The difference between someone like Frank Lucas and Tony Montana ("I kill Communists for fun, but for a green card I'm gonna carve him up real nice") is that one kills out of necessity and the other kills for sheer, sadistic pleasure. At the very beginning of American Gangster, Harlem gangster Lucas douses a victim with gasoline and sets him on fire, and then puts four bullets in the victim's head as an act of mercy. Can there be any doubt that Scarface would have let him burn to a cinder?
The complex moral factors that drive American Gangster are what make it every bit as compelling as Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Frank Lucas may engage in the behavior of sadists, but he is not a sadist, and he behaves like a gangster to the degree that such behavior comes with the territory - you don't become the head of a multimillion-dollar narcotics empire by being a law-abiding citizen. We have seen scores of gangster films in which characters wallow in their depravity - watch Al Pacino go berserk with a machine gun at the end of Scarface or Joe Pesci shoot a kid in the foot for the hell of it in Goodfellas, and realize that such men could only ever live a life of crime because vile sadism and cruelty come natural to them. Frank Lucas, like the perennial figure of the gangster genre, Don Corleone, is on a different wavelength. Scene after scene of this powerful film, directed by Ridley Scott in a nice, brisk, change of pace for him, we are reminded that men like Frank Lucas (or Don Corleone) could have lived perfectly normal, honest lives had they not been dealt such a bad hand. It simply was not in the cards for a man like Frank Lucas to live such a life. A life of violence was the only life he ever knew, but that did not mean, necessarily, that he had to enjoy it. Lucas, in this film, moves through a sea of drugs, sex, and violence, but with the air of a dignified shogun - always surveying, not actually engaging.
The name of Frank Lucas may not come as naturally as say, John Gotti, or Pablo Escobar, but for a generation raised upon films about the Italian Mafia and the Hispanic drug trade, that is understandable. There really was a Frank Lucas who operated a narcotics empire out of Harlem and in the late 60s and early 70s, became more powerful than the Cosa Nostra before the Feds finally brought him down. How did he do it? With a mixture of ambition, raw nerve, ruthlessness, and a South Asian narcotics smuggling scheme so diabolically brilliant that discussing it here would ruin its shock value.
But who was this man, exactly? He was a gangster, yes, but only by the very definition of the word. In this film, he takes his mother to church every Sunday, unites the entire Lucas clan into a sprawling New Jersey mansion, dotes on his wife, all while amassing inconceivable power and leaving many dead in the process. He engages in the violence that comes with such a profession, but he does not indulge in it; he does not allow himself to be weighed down by it. He addresses his subordinates with all the authority and dignity of a legitimate CEO, we never see him actually snort any cocaine, and when his wife buys him a mink coat - once the official uniform of a Harlem gangster - he hurls it in the fireplace in disgust. This was a man just begging for a more peaceful, honest second life.
Denzel Washington plays Lucas in a role that even further cements his status as one of the most indomitable and uncompromising of leading men. At 52, he still remains one of the most attractive of stars, and his movie-star handsomeness is what makes his villainous roles all the more hypnotic to watch. As with his portrayal crooked cop Alonzo Harris in Training Day, he uses his appearance as means to shield an internal pool of deep anger and resentment, and to shift between alluring and despicable in a way that few other actors can. Frank Lucas himself must have been a great actor himself - you do not take your mother to church after killing dozens of people without being able to shut down yourself emotionally in some way.
Russell Crowe, as Robert Ritchie, the narcotics cop who brought Lucas down, plays powerfully a bruising, hard-driven man already up to his elbows in corruption and alimony payments even before Frank Lucas came into his life. His Serpico-like honesty makes him a pariah in his precinct, and a life without the perks of police corruption have brought him little to nothing - Josh Brolin, in stark contrast, oozes snake-oil contempt as a slick-haired, corrupt narcotics officer who wants to be as powerful as Lucas while still keeping the veneer of an honest man.
Crowe and Washington have a great final scene of dialogue together during which both of them realize that by being the men they are, they have made themselves outsiders. And the film, like all the great ones of the gangster genre, makes us realize that sometimes, there is no greater a burden that that of morality. A
Be the first to comment on this article!